Related Art
The present invention generally relates to techniques for providing secure web services.
The World Wide Web (WWW), or “web” for short, has permeated almost all aspects of our lives—from buying cameras to buying real estate, and from reading a newspaper to watching a movie. Unfortunately, the web can also be a very dangerous place where even savvy users can compromise highly sensitive information or suffer substantial financial loss.
Hence, providing secure access to web services is an important security problem. However, this problem is particularly challenging for at least two reasons. First, the Internet is inherently insecure because it is a public network. As a result, systems and techniques to provide secure access to web services over the Internet need to address a wide variety of security issues. Second, the web owes much of its phenomenal success to its highly scalable architecture, and to its user-friendly interface, e.g., the web-browser. Hence, it is important to ensure that a security solution is both scalable and user friendly. In other words, creating systems and techniques that provide secure access to web services can be very challenging because these systems and techniques need to be highly secure, scalable, and user friendly.